Men's Otters vs Weymouth 2

Scorers: O Shepherd, G Redding

After last season's seemingly endless run of home games through September and October, we were definitely all more than pleased to start the new League fixtures with an 11am start in Weymouth - thankfully on a sunny day.

After a brief discussion concerning positional tactics we started what was a very even first half against Weymouth 2s, who are a bit of an unknown quantity having only come into the League this season. We had some problems getting the ball from midfield to the forwards and the match ebbed and flowed with neither team looking like scoring until five minutes from half time a shot was fired across the face of our goal, the excellent Dave Kirby had his angles covered but sloppy marking saw a young attacker pop up on the back post to slot the ball home and give Weymouth the comfort of a 1-0 half time lead.

In the break we chatted about workrate and discipline in defence and attack. We needed to be able to captalise on the excellent work being done by Lennon Hampton in midfield who was creating excellent opportunities from which we should have been profiting.

And we showed much better organisation right from the start of the second half. Within two minutes we had worked our way into an advanced position, Clarky flicked the ball into the D just above ankle height and Owen Shepherd poked the ball over the line with a clean touch.

At 1-1 we settled down and thereafter we really began to dominate the game, and our front line started to give the Weymouth defence no end of problems. Jack Sweed found himself in the right place at the right time with only the keeper to beat but unfortunately miscontrolled the ball much to the relief of the Weymouth defence. Seb Walmsley's intelligent running and use of space helped us keep our territorial advantage and we started to play decent possession hockey from front to back. And so, it wasn't much of a surprise when George Redding forced his way through two players at the top of the D and cracked a fine shot past the keeper to put us 2-1 up after 46 minutes. 

Soon after we again went extremely close to extending our lead when Adam Shepherd just failed to finish a penalty corner move on the right post, but in all fairness Weymouth hardly got a sniff of an equaliser with our defence in total control and Dave in complete command between the posts. We saw out the rest of the game comfortably and when the final whistle eventually went we recognised the fantastic match contribution by Dan Foster in defence who hadn't put a foot wrong all day.

Tea wasn't bad either - this was a really good result for a young Otters side who showed great spirit away from home to take the points and get the season off to a decent start.